Mark Devlin
The mother of all failures. Screw up on education, and you break the economy, you break social cohesion, and you break law and order. This was the test Nicola proudly set herself on becoming First Minister. So let’s check her report card…
No other policy area has seen such deep rooted and systemic change at the hands of the SNP than the education system in Scotland, and they’ve made a pig’s ear of it. After abolishing tuition fees, changing the curriculum, changing the exams, changing the measurements, by just about every metric you could muster, what was once the envy of the world is now a concealed, shameful little secret of failure and missed opportunity.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows Scottish educational standards are as askew as the tower this acronym was inspired by. Down in maths, down in science, fewer young people from deprived backgrounds getting to university than England (where they increased tuition fees let alone abolished them), employers desperately trying to plug the skills gap left by the SNP’s reformed education system.
The nation which proudly shaped the modern world through innovation and enterprise would attract scorn from the likes of Adam Smith, Alexander Fleming and James Watt.
Nicola said herself “judge me by my record on education” but she is forever removing Scotland from the measurements to do so, removing themselves from two international comparison surveys, and scrapping a number of domestic measurements here at home.
Well Nicola, we’ve looked at the evidence – consider yourself judged.
